The development of wireless technologies has increased opportunities to access to the Internet. There is a constant growth in the number of public wireless access points that provide free access to the Internet. The wireless access points are located in the subway, shopping centers, airports, libraries, in the street, and so on.
A wireless access point generally includes an apparatus that provide wireless access to an already existing network (e.g., wireless or wireline). For transmission of information, wireless access points use radio waves from the frequency spectrum as determined by a standard, such as IEEE 802.11, GPRS, EDGE, HSPA and so on.
Wireless access points may be multifunctional, which means that they may not only organize a wireless network and provide the wireless connection of notebooks, computers, PDAs and other mobile devices of a local-area network, but also are able through various operating conditions to expand the existing wireless network, operate in a state of connection to the provider by a wireless network, operate as a wireless bridge for the connection of two wireline networks that are isolated from each other, and perform other functions.
In turn, mobile device users are eager to use wireless access points to access the Internet. Mobile device users take advantage of the opportunity to go online in order to chat on social networks, read the news, check email, perform bank transactions, and so on.
It must be kept in mind that a user, by connecting to a wireless access point, runs the risk of being tricked and user's activity on the network may be accessible to third parties. The need therefore arises to warn the user as to the possible consequences of using wireless access points and to inform the user when a selected access point is trusted (e.g., secure).